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Essay on Compare and contrast philosophers
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast the philosophers so I am comparing and contrasting the most famous philosophers Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato.
Issues they have chosen to Focus on:
Socrates
The main motto of Socrates was “Know Thyself” meaning that for him it was essential that a person should achieve self-knowledge. He was convinced that one could only act on the basis of truth and most people are ignorant about a variety of aspects of life and it is essential that one should gain knowledge. For Socrates ignorance was the disease of soul. He explained his point with the example that the only one thing is worse than having cancer and that is having cancer but not knowing it so when one knows about the disease naturally he will seek treatment for it. In order to fulfill his thoughts he used “Socratic questioning” later on called by Plato “dialectic” which was a conversational method that proceeds by means of series of questions and answers and the most powerful feature of this method was that the person discovered for themselves the facts that they were ignorant of and were given an opportunity to explore themselves.
He believed that truth was not something to be found outside of us, through the senses but we possess it already within ourselves, within our souls, and all we need is to discover it and bring it to light of the day. This later became known as the doctrine of “Innate ideas.”
As far as his political philosophy is concerned he had 2 points. One was about the “natural law” that there is universal moral law than no government tells but the man knows it through his reason and experience and second is “social contract theory” explaining that our relationship with government is contractual one because government provides................
